Papers by Magdalyn Asimakis
Gallery 44, 2020
Allegory helps us to see and narrativize wider, more diffuse conditions. It is a technique of kno... more Allegory helps us to see and narrativize wider, more diffuse conditions. It is a technique of knowledge production and a tool of cultural discipline. Every monster story is an allegory, its imagery conjured to stand in for a terror that is not yet knowable, and not yet named. Frankenstein’s creature, vampires, lycanthropes, Medusa... their portraits double as holding places for, and shields against, the rumbling of a more extensional threat which is not so easily described or faced. Positioned at the boundary of the civic order, marked, rejected, and banned, the monsters persist on intruding. The control and mobilization of their images, then, grants a form of power. Faced with the threat of trespass, we recognize our identity all the more clearly and seek to protect ourselves against said threat. It is with recognition of the monstrous form that we make the monster real.
A Few Howls Again was meant to open in March 2020 but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In lieu of the physical installation, Gallery 44 hosted two online video screenings and discussions with Silvia Kolbowski. The in-person iteration was presented as originally intended save for a textual insert. The disjointed temporality of the exhibition and its public program echoes the state of suspension we find ourselves in, as well as the allegorical time and recursive understanding of historical crisis that Kolbowski’s work elucidates and deploys.
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Book Reviews by Magdalyn Asimakis
Art Papers, 2022
"The curator’s introduction lays some wobbly ground, the basis of which leans into a Western art-... more "The curator’s introduction lays some wobbly ground, the basis of which leans into a Western art-historical narrative of linear progress. The application of Panofsky’s quote to the relationship between Greek antiquity (past) and contemporary art (future) creates a faulty framework in which contemporary art is post-time and post-place. This perception of “past” is a common positioning for places with well-known ancient histories in the Western imagination, and Greek antiquity is often framed as a source, rather than an actual context, with its own specificity and entanglements. Obrist’s dependence upon this perspective is solidified by his later question, “is antiquity a toolbox?” The question creates a visual—one uncomfortably analogous to the looting of Athens—in which ruins can be re-narrativized with ease, and without conceptual or cultural implications."
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Papers by Magdalyn Asimakis
A Few Howls Again was meant to open in March 2020 but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In lieu of the physical installation, Gallery 44 hosted two online video screenings and discussions with Silvia Kolbowski. The in-person iteration was presented as originally intended save for a textual insert. The disjointed temporality of the exhibition and its public program echoes the state of suspension we find ourselves in, as well as the allegorical time and recursive understanding of historical crisis that Kolbowski’s work elucidates and deploys.
Book Reviews by Magdalyn Asimakis
A Few Howls Again was meant to open in March 2020 but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In lieu of the physical installation, Gallery 44 hosted two online video screenings and discussions with Silvia Kolbowski. The in-person iteration was presented as originally intended save for a textual insert. The disjointed temporality of the exhibition and its public program echoes the state of suspension we find ourselves in, as well as the allegorical time and recursive understanding of historical crisis that Kolbowski’s work elucidates and deploys.